Mayflower Road
The East Coast of the United States was colonized. It was conquered. It was developed. It was domesticated.
Behold the grand megalopolis—the pinnacle of civilization.
You will find humans in every variety of misery. You will see them in their townhouses, their studio apartments, their penthouses, their law offices, their front porches, their back decks.
Take a step back.
To the Catskills. To the Berkshires. To the Green and White Mountains.
You can smell it. You can taste it—grains of what was and what can be. Run your fingers along the cold soil somewhere in the Taconic Mountains. Bring your view to the tracks.
Who made them? A mink? A fisher? A banker? A priest?
No. It was me.
You see my steps. They follow no linear structure—wobbling left, east, above, below.
And when you finally gather the courage to follow me—north of Providence, north of Boston, of Burlington, of Portland, of Augusta, of Orono—you will begin to do more than taste and smell the potential. You will feel it.
When the concrete ends—and yes, it does end—welcome to the Great North Woods.
Behold our lack of towns.
And yes, there are no towns. There are no counties, no mayors. There is only something they told you was extinct, extirpated from the region with the Mayflower—
Wilderness.
Yes. Wilderness beyond what they have told you.
How come you did not know?
Such a glorious place rests at the crown of the megalopolis.
Follow my tracks up Mount Katahdin.
Submerge your being under Baxter Pond. It’s cold and oh so alive. The air is buzzing with natural anarchy.
The Garden of Eden is here.
And they’re chopping down the trees.
That’s why I need you. Follow my tracks through these northern forests.
Three and a half million acres—this is not your city park.
Sit on the stump of a rotting black spruce and wince as a pack of white-tailed deer propel like a river through the dense woods.
Close your eyes.
Listen to the blue jays and the quacks coming from every corner.
Things happen in these woods that they’ll never tell you.
A roaming puma.
A south-wandering elk.
A gray wolf.
Ten gray wolves.
A polar bear came within 200 miles of these woods.
They won’t tell you, because they don’t want you to believe in magic.
And these Northwoods are full of it.
This is the last bastion of magic in this part of the world.
The trees are not panicked, but a light tension spreads among them. They know their long-standing permanence. They know the frailty of man. But they’ve never seen colonization like this.
And for the first time, they’ve begun to wonder if their stay is coming to an end.
Now listen to me.
Stand up off your stump.
Walk.
Walk.
Notice the change in my tracks.
Here, I started running.
Faster.
Run.
Run for me.
And listen.
Do you hear it?
The grumbling. The hungry. The restless.
The great golden road, as they call it.
Do not believe their lies of gold.
It is a logging road, owned by private corporations. A scar across our sanctuary.
I call it Mayflower Road.
And I ran to the Mayflower, log in my hand. And I heard it get louder and louder. The gnawing engines.
And there it was.
I found it— the vile road of gold.
And I launched my log—ten cubits wide—into the heart of that golden road.
I tripped. I fell.
I was immobilized. In pain. In embarrassment.
On the gravel.
The destroyed earth.
I lay across it like a blanket.
The engines, the tires, the agony grew louder.
Keep running.
Keep running.
Pick up the log.
Grow faster.
Hear them. Do you hear them?
Throw the log.
Break your legs.
Lay in the gravel.
There’s nothing you can do.
It’s best to go out like I did. Under the wheels of the logging car.
And if one day, human ignorance births human apocalypse—a likely possibility—you will return to the soil and be part of this magical forest.
What a beautiful incarnation that would be!
